War and Peace

It seems to me hard to believe now, but I recall reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace in the 5th or 6th grade. Reading was always one of my greatest pleasures, and my mother, although she kept hoping that I spend more time outside, “like the other kids,” is herself a book lover, and so she would go to the public library once a week to replenish my pile of books. I suppose it was her idea that I would enjoy Tolstoy. How could I have had the notion that I should read him at that age myself? I remember the book, thick and heavy, bound in light blue canvas. The printed pages appear in my memory satin-like, smooth and vintage shiny . . . but this recollection cannot be true. There could not have been such a fine book in our public library, a bare-bones municipal institution in the still somewhat socialist Israel of the 1970s. I delved into my borrowed War and Peace with great anticipation. It was a big book and I loved big books, they promised a long journey ahead. It turned out that this one would give me another, special pleasure. As I began to read I discovered that some of it was in French! Needless to say, War and Peace was written in Russian, but Tolstoy rendered some of the dialogue between his aristocratic characters in the language they would have spoken in the beginning of the 19th century. The translator to Hebrew, a renowned poet

called Lea Goldberg who was herself from Russia, kept it that way. There was a Hebrew translation of the French lines in the form of footnotes, at the bottom of each page. The reading was, therefore, quite disjointed, especially since I insisted on first reading the French, using my limited knowledge of the English alphabet, before turning to the Hebrew translation to understand what the characters actually said. By the time I finished reading the book I had learned a few words in French. I registered them visually, but since I had only a faint idea how to pronounce them, I developed my own way of speaking French, quietly, to myself. It seems to me that this first encounter, with its undisturbed possibilities and hints of unknown plenty, is the root of French being for me, to this day, a special kind of phantasmagoric-linguistic Promised Land. Homi Bhabha (1994) writes about the sub-lingual, yet intensely meaningful chatter, originally described by Roland Barthes in retelling an afternoon hour in a café in Tangiers (1975, p. 49). It seems to me now that while reading War and Peace I experienced, and perhaps created, a similar kind of chatter, out of French sentences echoing in epic-poetic Hebrew a mysterious Russian universe. “Voila une belle mort” says Napoleon, looking at the dying prince Bolkonsky as the battle of Borodino draws to its bloody end . . . All this unfolding one afternoon after another as I sit at my desk by a large, west-facing window, open to the front yard of our apartment building, to the street beyond, where the other kids were annoyingly, loudly playing, and to the blasting afternoon sun of the Eastern Mediterranean. I was hardly ever allowed to roll down the wooden shade. My mother wanted there to be in our apartment all the air and light there was to be had. As if there was always around us a foreign, stale darkness to be chased away. She would open the windows wide first thing in the morning, even on the coldest winter days. And so much of the visual in my childhood memories of home is in over-exposure. To this day, I sometimes find myself literally squinting as I try to remember. Still, as I read War and Peace it was somehow easy for me to imagine the colors and hues of the damp Russian landscape where it endlessly takes place. Could it be that I somehow absorbed a sensual trace of Russia from my grandmother? She grew up in a small town called David Gorodok, not far from Pinsk, in White Russia, which is today the former Soviet republic of Belarus. Her stories were about being a pretty girl, the youngest of 10 children, 1 brother and 9 sisters, living a quotidian small-town life. She spoke with admiration about her father and beloved brother,

Naftali. I don’t recall her ever mentioning her mother or sisters, except for the only other sister who wound up in Palestine, and therefore alive, as well. She told about receiving adoring attention from the Russian peasants, Cossacks she called them. Her eyes would light up when she uttered her name as it was spoken by them – Raisale. In Palestine she took up the Hebrew version of her diaspora name – Shoshana. Many European Jews, some proudly, some reluctantly, gave up their non-Hebrew first and often family names when they stepped off the boats in the Jaffa harbor. It was a way to pledge allegiance to the realization of the Zionist project and its repudiation of the Diaspora and its legacy of humiliation. She kept her last name until she married my grandfather. Listening to her I always tried to imagine what the characters and scenes she talked about might have looked and sounded like. There were a few photographs to anchor my imagination, although their value was compromised by their fading grayness. I did not know I should ask more when I could have, now it is too late, she passed away. I am left wondering. What was it like to be a young girl during the First World War and the wild years that followed, when from 1918 to 1921 the Red, White and Polish armies fought in the forests and plains for and against the future of the Bolshevik revolution. After the war had ended, Pinsk and its surroundings became a part of Poland, which is why everyone who came from this area knew both Russian and Polish. The times were difficult. Some Jews departed to British Palestine, some to join the despised Ost Juden of Germany, some to Western Europe and the Americas. If any of that had an immediate impact on her life, it had no place in her stories. She left her hometown for Palestine by herself in 1933, age 23, after training in a Zionist camp to be an agricultural worker. I never asked myself what made it possible for her parents to let their youngest daughter leave on her own towards such an unknown future. They must have thought that there, in Poland, it could only be worse. They must have realized that they would not be able protect her. They must have had great hopes and faith in their pretty, young girl. Did they discuss it with her? How come she was the one chosen? My mother recalls that my grandmother once told her that she was too pretty to be safe in that barely governed no man’s land. She believed her parents feared her being coveted by a gentile whom it would be too dangerous to resist, and wind up being taken away from them. But was that not ultimately what they planned, and what happened to her? I wonder if this was the explanation they chose to give her, knowing that it

would resonate and convince their pretty daughter better than others. Perhaps they thought that being the prettiest of them all she had the best chance to do well in the Promised Land? In Palestine she worked in an orange grove, where she met a young, frail student from Vilna with the unusual name for an Eastern European Jew – Zecharia.2 They soon married and became parents. They called their daughter Aviva.3 When my mother was 3 years old her father died of tuberculosis. My grandmother was left a single mother. The year was 1940. Even if she had considered it, there was no way back home. War has broken in Europe. She told stories about raising my mother during those years, all on her own, but she never mentioned the obvious. It was probably around that time that she lost contact with her family forever. Germany invaded Poland in September of 1939, split it with the Soviet Union for close to 2 years, and after breaking its pact with the Soviets in June of 1941, took all of it, and further, most of western Russia. It is unknown to us whether my grandmother’s family was executed in a nearby forest by the SS death squads that followed the German army in operation Barbarossa, as many were, or transferred to a nearby Ghetto, perhaps in Minsk, to await a more organized extermination. What we do know is that no one survived, except for a cousin, 16 at the time, who heeded the advice of Russian soldiers retreating through town, that she come aboard their train or be killed by the advancing Germans. But that cousin, who went on that train without looking back, and wound up in China before traveling back to the Russian front to join the partisans, arrived in Palestine only after the war, married to the leader of the partisans she joined in the forests. If my grandmother ever wondered about the fate of her family during the long years of the war, when news had begun to arrive of the mass killing and death camps, if there was a period of uncertainty and hope that was finally dashed after the war ended, it was never mentioned. The entire affair was summed up in one sentence that sometimes concluded a story about her old life: “םמש חמי םיצאנה םלוכ תא וגרה”.4 Did I absorb from my grandmother, together with the rhythms and shades of our ancestral Russia, the sense of history obliterated and unattended mourning that was her fate? If I had, it all traveled deep into my unconscious, muffled by the needs of living and the nationalization of history that has been a dominant aspect of collective life in Israel. But as I age, and having left Israel more than two decades ago, some traces of my grandmother’s past have begun to surface. They come behind memories of what she was like as an old

woman, repeating her few stories to the young me who visited her loyally, although always in a state of angry disinterest. They hover in the background of the images I retained of the few pictures she brought with her from Russia and showed only rarely. And then a few years ago, well after her passing, the untold moment when she must have finally realized that everyone was dead began forming in my awareness. Since then, I cannot stop thinking about it, although “thinking” is not quite the right term to describe how this moment commands my attention. As they materialize in a transitional-melancholic space between knowledge, longing and imagination, these traces of things and people past carry with them a feeling of duty, as if demanding that I register something metaphysical. They drive my preoccupation with history, both personal and collective, and at the same time make this preoccupation a kind of desire for the future. Sometimes a trace appears uncannily, in a flash. A while ago while on a visit to the Netherlands, a photographer friend took a few pictures of me in his studio. Showing me one of them he said: “this one, your mother is going to love, you look like a Rabbi!” My friend never met my mother, who in fact disapproves of my facial hair, which is what made him see me as a Rabbi. No one in my immediate or extended family ever grew a beard. Up until recently, beards were in Israel the provenance of orthodox Jews, an anathema to my secular, old Labor party family. I had never pictured myself a Rabbi before, nothing could be further from my world of associations. It seemed to me a perception of a well-meaning, contemporary Dutch man, thinking in old stereotypes. All the same I was taken aback, it felt strange. I keep being surprised by how much Jewishness is noted in Europe, noted and remarked upon in the most peculiar moments with an intensity that betrays the still largely undigested and unsettled place of the Jews in European history. But at the same time, as he said it, I saw it myself. Actually, I saw an image of my bearded great-grandfather, standing somber at the doorway of his house in the Shtetl. I could not recall this image ever having come to mind before, but there it was, sharp in its original out-of-focus black and white, held in my grandmother’s soft hand. Bits of unclaimed memory rise unexpectedly, reverberating through time, carrying with them a past that, in my case, is destroyed and repressed and forgotten. A lifeline pulling together the present in which I now write, that moment of collision between image, stereotype and memory in the Netherlands, another moment in my grandmother’s bedroom where she is

showing me the photograph, the moment captured in the picture before the catastrophe that came upon us . . . a strange kind of haunting, cascading Nachträglichkeit. Haunting because beyond memory it has often the quality of witnessing, as if what comes up is not only past, as if it is still happening and I am being called to participate in it. Not surprisingly, as these commanding threads emerge I find myself concerned with the question of personal freedom. Are we all destined to either repress or express, in any case to compulsively participate in old stories that cast a spell too heavy to lift? Are we called to achieve an unachievable reconciliation between past and present? Is there the possibility of transcendence, or deliverance, or simply turning away from the departed whom, as Kafka lamented, insist on drifting back here? I am asking these questions since what I can only begin to glimpse in myself I see more clearly with others. Under the anxieties and obsessions of the present there is often an unformulated fear that one is trapped acting out other lives, carrying ghostly burdens, paralyzed by ageless grievances. This quality of otherness and alienation echoes from beyond the familial. Other generations, other times and places, breaks and connections that extend across distant, often unknown terrains and epochs. As I begin to remember, and to suspect that as a child I remembered more, then forgot,5 I realize how much I carry my grandmother and her history with me. Subtle sensations, as well as the kind of loneliness that descends when one’s heritage has been obliterated. How one feels in her body after a long day of work, alone with her child, and as she prepares their evening meal, the taste of the food her mother once cooked for her. How one remembers in the absence of time and space for mourning. How one settles, as they sometimes literally did, on swampland and quicksand. Through the images and sensations emerging, and against the walls of repression that still tower, I wonder how much, and what kinds of imagination and remembrance are possible. And as a struggle for, and against, the possibility of remembering and imagining has forced itself into my life, demanding to become my destiny, I wonder how much choice I have to partake in, or abandon this struggle. One aspect of this question has to do with one’s particular position in the universe of relations between individuals and societies. History is registered both personally and collectively, memory and imagination transpire in both the singular and plural registers. Whether, and how, one’s personal history can become intelligible depends on what kinds of

stories it is possible for us to tell ourselves and each other. Our ability to give an account of ourselves (Butler, 2005) is a function of our particular time and location, affiliations and attachments. Despite all wishes to the contrary, there is no view from nowhere. Yet, what is the nature of any particular, personal moment, what does it strive to repress or express visà-vis the infinity of being and time? I find it telling that in formulating this question and in the quest to answer it, I am drawn to the work of a few German-speaking Jewish intellectuals who, writing during the few, doomed years between the first and second world wars, were themselves urgently concerned with the relations between society, history and the individual. I am referring, in particular, to Ernst Bloch, Franz Kafka and Walter Benjamin. These three thinkers investigated the endless spaces between reality, memory and imagination, between the tragic and the transcendental, between theory and fiction. Kafka’s poetics of despair, Benjamin’s effort to decipher the nature of historical consciousness, Bloch’s encyclopedic exploration of the notion of Utopia, were all driven by a struggle to define some kind of truth that could be accessible to the individual despite the overwhelming enigma, impenetrability, or outright deceit, which the world and our life in it manifest. That this theme is as close as it gets to universal goes without saying. It is arguably the drive behind all philosophical thought. Yet these three approached it from a particular angle. The terrain they explored seems to me unmistakably reminiscent of an old, mythical Judaic landscape, a discursive reproduction of an endless out-of-Egypt desert to be lost in and discovered, an eternal expedition through an in-between present where identity can be shed and new essences can be revealed. Their sentiment crosses over from the pain of exile to the ambition of liberatory exodus.6 They proceed by miracles that they plead and command into being. Their journey, both paradoxical and heuristic, strives to return to a promised future, and as in the original exodus story told in the Bible, it is full of hope facing the traitorousness of human nature and the reality of suffering. They create an echo chamber where ancient questions are recaptured and propelled ahead in a new language that is all the same traditional. They each offer their own idiomatic, idiosyncratic renderings of an infinite, collective Nachträglichkeit that echoes from antiquity all the way to the place where I now stand. On the one end of the endless desert, Kafka’s intricate despair. One of the many examples: a conversation between Kafka and Max Brod

(recorded by Walter Benjamin writing on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of Kafka’s death): “I remember,” Brod writes, “a conversation with Kafka which began with present-day Europe and the decline of the human race. ‘We are nihilistic thoughts, suicidal thoughts that come into God’s head,’ Kafka said. This reminded me at first of the Gnostic view of life: God as the evil demiurge, the world as his fall. ‘Oh no,’ said Kafka, ‘our world is only a bad mood of God, a bad day of his.’ ‘Then there is hope outside this manifestation of the world that we know.’ He smiled. ‘Oh, plenty of hope, an infinite amount of hope – but not for us’ ” (Benjamin, 1955, p. 116). Benjamin himself contemplated literature, art, theology, and the streets of European cities, most famously the characters and architecture of 19thcentury Paris, in an effort to discern the elusive, fundamental presence of history in time, or in other words, the relations between the past and the present. As he travels across texts and landscapes, Benjamin draws a map of human consciousness as an infinite journey of forgetting and remembering, an ongoing Proustian moment of awakening that is always both eternal and impossibly too brief. He offers in this context some of his most opaque and enigmatic formulations, but he also quotes the grandfather in Kafka’s “The Next Village”: “Life is astonishingly short. As I look back over it life seems so foreshortened to me that I can hardly understand, for instance, how a young man can decide to ride over to the next village without being afraid that, quite apart from the accidents, even the span of a normal life that passes happily may be totally insufficient for such a ride” (1955, p. 135). When he famously writes that “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism” (1955, p. 256), Benjamin resonates with Kafka’s view of life as an always too long a ride through a nihilistic, suicidal eternity. But he is also inspired by a perspective on time that he finds in the Judaic cannon, where, in his rendering, “every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter” (1955, p. 264). Sober realism, yet the possibility of transcendence in every moment.7 God may yet reveal himself, as he has, repeatedly, in the desert. The angel of history may untangle himself from the “single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage . . .” (Benjamin, 1955, p. 257). Bloch’s ultimate design for our bleak existence is equally ambitious. He anchors it in a phenomenology based on the notion of a “not-yetconscious.” His project is the development of a subject-oriented version

of Marxism by theorizing a drive inherent in all things and in history itself towards a perfect future – a hopeful essence that is already there yet needs to be brought up to consciousness, and made conscious, could change the course of history itself. Bloch opens The spirit of Utopia, with a stark, Cartesian-like statement: “I am by my self ” (1964, p. 7). Yet, at the end of his journey he draws the outline of utopia. The son of an assimilated Jewish railway worker, a student of Simmel and an associate of Brecht and Lukacs, in the last page of The spirit of Utopia he finds his inspiration in Corinthians, and in the Zohar. The last sentence of the book echoes like a prayer: “only the unjust exist through their god, but the just – God exists through them, and into their hands is given the consecration of the Name, the very appointment of God, who moves and stirs in us . . .” (1964, p. 278). I find myself surprised in realizing how much god and the messiah appear in Bloch, Kafka and Benjamin. Surprised, in a way, as I was when my Dutch friend saw in my face the likeness of a Rabbi. I find myself forced to re-cognize in the face of what appears to me as absolutely other, as Puget (2010) puts it, yet the otherness I am encountering is suspect. There is in this otherness something that feels forced, acquired, a form of forgetfulness or repression. . . . That I am surprised to find Jewish theology in the thought of Marxist scholars and in the poetry of alienation that came to define a certain European sensibility between the two world wars is an effect of the cultural revolution that raged through postholocaust Zionism, by which I was educated. Where I learned to read and write, God was on the one hand a historical character one reads about in the Bible, and on the other a political asset in the haggling between religions and secular, right and left political parties. The messiah has been pulled from transcendence to mortal immanence. He, everyone was asked to agree, had already come in the form of the state of Israel. But what the ethos that formed my mind makes me see at first as a strange presence is in fact old and familiar. The heritage that animates the work of these three intellectual forefathers, barely disguised Rabbis, is becoming recognizable to me. It feels compelling and, moreover, urgent. As if through the fits and starts of my memory I rescued it from oblivion and in so doing I somehow became responsible. It is from this place that I would like to engage Homi Bhabha’s The Location of Culture. Bhabha’s The Location of Culture is, among other things, an effort analogous to that of Benjamin, Bloch and Kafka, to find

the place of subjectivity in the perpetual avalanche of culture and history. The question he investigates is this: what is the potential of subjective meaning and agency in a world where social forces govern the very coordinates of space, time and language. Bhabha suggests that subjective agency could be found in the gaps that open within, or on the margins of the discursive spaces and temporalities that structure our lived experience. He writes:

The individuation of the agent occurs in a moment of displacement. It is a pulsational incident, the split-second movement when the process of the subject’s designation – its fixity – opens up beside it, uncannily, abseits, a supplementary space of contingency. In this ‘return’ of the subject, thrown back across the distance of the signified, outside the sentence, the agent emerges as a form of retroactivity, Nachträglichkeit. It is not agency as itself (transcendent, transparent) or in itself (unitary, organic, autonomous). As a result of its own splitting in the time-lag of signification, the moment of the subject’s individuation emerges as an effect of the intersubjective – as the return of the subject as agent.